## Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2016/326

Square Attack on 7-Round Kiasu-BC

Christoph Dobraunig and Maria Eichlseder and Florian Mendel

Abstract: Kiasu-BC is a tweakable block cipher presented within the TWEAKEY framework at AsiaCrypt 2014. Kiasu-BC is almost identical to AES-128, the only difference to AES-128 is the tweak addition, where the 64-bit tweak is xored to the first two rows of every round-key. The security analysis of the designers focuses primarily on related-key related-tweak differential characteristics and meet-in-the-middle attacks. For other attacks, they conclude that the security level of Kiasu-BC is similar to AES-128. In this work, we provide the first third-party analysis of Kiasu-BC. We show that we can mount Square attacks on up to 7-round Kiasu-BC with a complexity of about $2^{48.5}$ encryptions, which improves upon the best published 7-round attacks for AES-128. Furthermore, we show that such attacks are applicable to the round-reduced OCB3-like mode of the CAESAR candidate Kiasu. To be specific, we show a key-recovery attack on 7-round Kiasu$\neq$ with a complexity of about $2^{82}$ encryptions.

Category / Keywords: secret-key cryptography / Cryptanalysis, TWEAKEY, Kiasu, Square Attack

Original Publication (in the same form): ACNS 2016

Date: received 23 Mar 2016, last revised 13 Jun 2016

Contact author: christoph dobraunig at iaik tugraz at

Available format(s): PDF | BibTeX Citation

Short URL: ia.cr/2016/326

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